


Learn How to Use It

by sirenalley



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Age Difference, Anal Sex, Angst, Blow Jobs, Choking, Guilt, M/M, Past Rape/Non-con, Rough Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-13
Updated: 2019-07-13
Packaged: 2020-06-27 08:53:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19787500
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sirenalley/pseuds/sirenalley
Summary: “You weren’t saying that five minutes ago,” Ash cuts in. “I think you’ll feel differently soon. Don’t you trust me?”Trust has nothing to do with it. Trust isn’t what has them both shuttered in here, isn’t what has Ash perched on the toilet lid, isn’t what thatlooksuggests.





	Learn How to Use It

_Gasp, breathe._

—

The yellow glare of the overhead light washes out everything in his periphery. His eyes travel over the interior of the bathroom stall, shifting from grubby dirt-smudged tile underfoot to colorful graffiti to a small basket of brown paper towels perched atop the toilet’s tank. His mind begins to follow the thread of inane detail like he’s desperately chasing a lead, pitching his brain out of this one single moment—

“Am I boring you, old man? Don’t fall asleep on me or I might bite your dick off.”

Max takes in a sharp breath. His belt jangles, a metallic sound loud in the undisturbed air, and unease turns over in his gut. “Ash, look, maybe this isn’t such a good idea—”

“You weren’t saying that five minutes ago,” Ash cuts in. “I think you’ll feel differently soon. Don’t you trust me?”

Trust has nothing to do with it. Trust isn’t what has them both shuttered in here, isn’t what has Ash perched on the toilet lid, isn’t what that _look_ suggests. Max can see only the feline glint of gemstone eyes, tilted at an angle hidden from the bathroom bulb’s intense wattage. Gloom shades the meaning of Ash’s expression. Trust has never taken him into this realm—it doesn’t feel like a two-way street. 

A hand’s on his cock, freeing it from its fabric fold of underwear and slacks, and that mouth pops over the head in a greedy lash of tongue. Electric arousal drags through Max in one blistering wave. He even hears himself, to his own utter humiliation, and he’s never sounded anything like it before: guttural, dark, animal, like Ash has hooked a slender finger into his belly and pulled something primal loose. He knows better. It’s simpler than that. It’s a mouth on his dick, slick and hot on the inside as it swallows him down to its extent. Ash stops at a certain depth to cradle him on the flat of a tongue. He slows, red lips a tight circle of pressure, working every new high-tide line further up the length of Max’s cock. 

His hand finds the curtain of blond hair at Ash’s temple and winds into it for a more secure grip. Resistance comes, Ash pulls, scalp in a strain under Max’s grasp—he’s moments from letting go when the mouth around him suddenly _gives_ and Ash’s throat opens to take him all the way in with an obscene sound. He feels the blunt head of his dick connect with the narrow back of Ash’s throat, and that’s as far as he can go. Ash’s nose is buried in the thick curls at the base. When Max looks down, those dangerous eyes have narrowed to slits. As if feeling his gaze, they close, and now he can see long white lashes on high cheekbones instead. 

It feels better than anything he can imagine. Better than fucking his ex-wife (a guilty whisper of private confession in his mind), better in a thousand dimensions as Ash’s throat opens around him. He keeps that grasp on Ash’s hair without thought until he feels another struggle—how long had he held him down on his cock in those splitting moments of tension, unable to inhale air? Max begins to extract his fingers when he hears a sound, a groan of growling protest.

Thinking he’s misunderstood, Max lifts his hand off like he’s touched a hot coil. “Sorry, I, uh—”

Ash’s fingers cover his own, force them back into the tangle of his own hair as he manages a sharp inhale through his nose. His eyes still haven’t opened. 

There’s a subtle shift. They don’t speak again. Max wrests control of the blowjob, and it takes on a new layer of roughness he’s never dreamed of trying with Jessica, or anyone, and he’s traded thought from a rational filtered brain to the aching swell of a stiff cock because he doesn’t question Ash. He doesn’t question what Ash can handle. Of course Ash can handle this. Ash can handle anything.

Both hands twine into soft, silky hair, thumbs pressed to the delicate skin of a scalp as he pushes himself into the depth of Ash’s mouth over and over, an unending rhythm that has saliva pooling at the corner of Ash’s tight lips. Ash’s pale face burns red across the bridge of his nose. His eyes never open, and he never touches Max anywhere again except with hungry lips and tongue, and he’s silent except when he’s forced to take Max’s cock to its thick base—only then does he give a weak, pleading little sound, stifled with his mouth full.

Max gets addicted to that sound. It can’t be healthy, but he chases it like a man enslaved until he feels that rush at the boundary of a steep edge. He empties into Ash’s throat with a groan shaken loose deep in his chest, feels his balls drain with effusive pleasure that sits somewhere in his stomach, pours out everything he has. Ash swallows it all. There’s a practiced element to that too, the way Ash’s red tongue cleans off spit and cum and how he wipes a spilled drop from his chin with the back of a delicate wrist.

The moment folds into itself. Reality and rationality return to Max as soon as he watches Ash begin to tuck him in and refasten his pants. What the hell is he doing that for?

“Mop the drool off your mouth,” Ash commands. His voice is rough and his bow-shaped lips are swollen red, like he’s wearing woman’s lipstick. “It really isn’t a good look on you.”

“Don’t be a brat.” Max doesn’t mean it, but irritation is the familiar and well-traveled path from point A to point B in conversation with this particular boy, and his mind remains a glaze of oxytocin.

Ash stands in one movement, graceful and fluid, so they’re brought front to front. He can feel Ash’s humid breath on his chin. Tall and sinewy, still, and so thin he’d bend into Max’s arms like a paper doll. A lethal illusion.

“Out, c’mon,” Ash plants both palms on Max’s chest to push. “It _reeks_ in here.”

And this time the struggle is a real one, like Ash wants nothing more than to free himself of the cramped stall and scrape the taste out of his mouth with Diet Pepsi. At least that’s what Max’s imagination tells itself. Maybe it’s the shame slanting his interpretation as it chases in after orgasm. 

Whatever the real reason, Max doesn’t protest.

—

_Who am I becoming?_

—

It escalates. They’re in the expensive Manhattan condo, Ash’s glasses discarded somewhere on the plush carpet, a void silence overtaking the dark room. The sun’s long set beyond New York’s jagged-teeth skyline. 

He’s got Ash facedown on the mattress and he’s fucking him harder than he’s fucked anyone in his life. There’s no care, no gentleness, because that’s what Ash seems to demand of him. It’s not that Max is in control here—he doesn’t feel like he is. Ash puts Max’s hands where he wants them to go. If the rhythm doesn’t maintain a staccato brutality, then he’ll stop, tell Max to go harder, rock backwards against him with vicious suggestion. And Max follows that leash of lust where it takes him. 

A pattern emerges through the fog of sex. He notices it one night while Ash is straddled across his lap and takes his dick with the expertise a teenager should not willfully possess, skin a sheen of sweat, nipples raw pink where he’d pushed Max’s teeth onto them.

Max watches as Ash pulls one of his hands up to his own throat, coaxes fingers around the circle of it in a necklace, applies pressure. Max takes a firm hold and feels Ash’s body melt over his dick—and those jewel eyes go closed, as always—a liquid slide of fucking while Ash takes him inside over and over again. He feels Ash’s heartbeat in the center of his palm, a frantic tickle, a bird’s struggle.

Not that scandalous, maybe, but it’s the _way_ it’s done. The way Ash never looks him in the eye. How he wants his head pushed down on the pillows with his ass open around Max’s cock, how he remains silent except for ragged breath and an occasional command, how he’ll pry himself away as soon as Max is finished in him. How rarely he’s able to get Ash off himself—when reaching under, desperate for the evidence that this is not one-sided, that this is a mutual lust, Ash will smack his hand away. And afterward Ash will lock himself in the bathroom alone.

As time continues, it feels more and more like Max is pressed to a wall of ballistic glass. There’s no way through the opaque window that is Ash Lynx. He’ll find himself in the middle of sex, watching the length of his dick vanish past that slick rim of Ash’s hole as he holds Ash immobile, and shame at how _hot_ it is takes root. Shame, guilt, an impending avalanche of wrongness. He tells himself he wouldn’t be doing this unless Ash invited him, reeled him in like easy prey. But there’s agency. Telling himself otherwise is dishonest. 

Sweaty and bare-skinned in the act, Max rolls off and sits on the end of the bed. They’re not in the condo anymore. The apartment is run-down, spiderweb cracks in the ceiling and jammed wood windowsills overlooking the ugly view of an office building lot. He’d had both of Ash’s hands pinned by his own larger ones—he can still feel the warmth of those slender finger-bones in his grip.

“Sorry, I just,” Max says, halts, restarts. “Can’t. We gotta stop this.”

There’s movement on the mattress as Ash shifts. His body is long and lean and pale in the slant of artificial city light outside. Silence hangs as palpable as humid air between them, but he doesn’t look at Ash’s face. 

Ash’s recovery is quick. “Why, did you pull a muscle? You should pace yourself. Getting old isn’t easy.”

“You know that’s not what I mean. Goddamnit, Ash. This,” Max waves a hand, trying to will his eyes from lingering on how Ash looks naked, so near him. “It just feels wrong, you know? Like I’m not… any better than those bastards who—”

“Shut the hell up.” Ash’s sudden anger radiates white hot in the center of a small sun. 

“No,” Max says. “Do you even _like_ it? ‘Cause I can’t tell, Ash, I really can’t—”

Ash is off the bed, fluid and quick, pulling on ratty street clothes in haste. “Lay off, old man. It’s not any of your damn business.”

“It is! If I’m gonna be fucking you, it is!” Ever articulate, Max stands in a graceless stumble. “Sometimes it’s like you’re not even there. It’s like—Chrissakes, you’re just some doll to throw around, like you don’t mean anything and that’s not true, don’t you get that? Damnit, Ash! You mean something to me.”

They’re both standing across from each other, Ash fully dressed and Max naked, and it feels as if all of the heat has bled out of the room. The look on Ash’s face is stricken and slit-open in a way he’s never seen it: eyes wide and round in fear, mouth slack, brows drawn in a tight grimace. Then it vanishes. As though it wasn’t there, Ash regains a stony composure with the self-possession of a boy much older than he actually is. 

In a whip of movement, Ash turns and leaves.

Pressure in Max’s chest makes it difficult to inhale. He sucks down air like he’s forgotten how to automate the process throughout that entire conversation. He sinks back down onto the edge of the bed, puts his head into his hands, and focuses on every individual motion until he’s remembered how to breathe.

—

_Where am I now,_

—

Max watches him across the desk. Books are piled on its surface, some medical journals, weeks of research and painstaking notes through all the leads they’ve chased on Banana Fish. Max, confined to the quarantine of backup while Ash is out there on the frontlines, at stake against their enemy. He almost liked it better when they were traveling across the country, coast to coast, because at least then he had an eye on Ash. At least then he felt directly useful.

They’re onto something, he knows that. It doesn’t make it any easier.

Ash says something about their next steps, Max gives his honest and unhelpful input, Ash’s intellect slashes sharp and witty across it. Max gets the vague impression he’s being left out of a secret. On and on, three cups of coffee later and the morning’s burnt into a hot afternoon outside the window of the apartment building. No view of Central Park from here; no view of the Corsican Foundation’s offices across the street.

He doesn’t know how it begins, but the tension shatters like a piece of sheet metal bent in half, and he’s got Ash up against the wall in the next space of a moment. Max tries to kiss him, is instead steered by hands until he’s got his mouth and teeth on the column of his throat, until he’s inhaling the clean scent of skin and aching for the familiar body hidden beneath ratty street clothes. 

Guilt, again, an anchor in his gut. This shouldn’t be Max pawing his hands all over Ash. This isn’t what Ash wants, because maybe he doesn’t know what he wants, or maybe he’s crossed want with need and tangled all of it up. He’s seen how Ash and Eiji interact—Eiji, pure and kind, whose touches and words are whole, platonic, without selfish subtext. Ash needs someone like Eiji who won’t look at him with the desire to tear off his clothing or fuck his mouth or bruise tender stretches of flesh. 

Somewhere halfway through the same old rhythm of the past, Max snaps back into himself. He becomes aware of what he’s doing. He finds his palms spanned across Ash’s narrow shoulders, delicate as hollow bird-bones beneath an open hand, Ash’s back flat to the bed. Max has those long legs hiked up over strong, tawny forearms and his cock is sheathed inside the tight clench of Ash’s body. They’re pressed so close together he can feel Ash’s erratic pulse through a layer of muscle. The heat in the room is a living thing as only New York in the height of summer can achieve: an island of metal and glass set in the glare of the sun too long. He can feel sweat traveling down the line of his spine.

He lifts one hand and cradles Ash’s face, cupped over his cheek, uncharacteristic gentleness. Ash’s eyes are closed and his cheeks are red from exertion.

“Hey, look at me,” Max pleads. “Just look at me, Ash.”

Those eyes blink open, pale lashes like a gossamer web—and where he expects to find legendary anger, or calculative ice, all he sees is empty fathomless green like the bottom of a tidepool. There’s nothing in it. 

“It’s okay,” he finds himself saying, voice tripping over the words. It feels like he _has_ to say this. “Hey, I’m with you.”

The fucking becomes a slow and tentative shadow of past desperation. His mouth finds the curve of Ash’s jaw and kisses it, up to his ear, corner of an open eye, all with care and precision. When he tries to kiss Ash on the mouth this time, Ash’s lips part on a chipped sound, like a gasp that doesn’t ever manage to materialize into protest.

Then he feels Ash shudder against him, wet on overheated skin. He’s crying. Max has never seen Ash cry—never seen him come anywhere close, wasn’t certain he could, thought that was all dammed up behind a construction of iron-wrought resilience and intelligence. But here he is now, broken down, tears leaking from the corners of those bright overfull eyes, expression blown open into a heartbreaking chasm of feeling. Then Ash shoves him off, their bodies separated in an inappropriately intimate slide, and he climbs from the bed, stumbling, to disappear inside the adjacent bathroom. A pattern playing out.

He sits on the mattress until it gets cold, calls Ash’s name a few times, but he doesn’t come out, so Max gives up, puts his clothes on piece by piece, and fills up another cup of coffee. Eventually Ash will reemerge like a phoenix melted out of its own feathers and he’ll have returned to normal. Nothing will be left.

—

_where should I go?_

—

Max never touches him again. 

There’s no opportunity, no invitation, not as the rest of the world begins to bear down in dangerous looming theat, and he suspects the gate into Ash’s head has locked and sealed forever. He’s left on the cold ground outside. It’s as much as he deserves. There were depths inside that boy that no one could reach, least of all some sorry bastard like himself. 

Eiji was always the most important factor. The exception, the safe place. It’s never inspired any jealousy in Max. Only wonder and curiosity at the shelter of Eiji’s existence to Ash and what that means, how it can be protected.

So when Ash comes to the door with a gun and a leather jacket, Max finds his mind lunging immediately for _Eiji_. And he hands over the documents, all the research and evidence he’s risked his own life to protect up to this point as only a pawn in a game can hope to do, just like a man might surrender his soul to a beautiful green-eyed devil.

“Ash.” The door is half-closed, dread a plain white curtain on Ash’s face. Max feels like he’s going to puke. “Save your friend. Go on, get out of here.”

What his head screams to the silence of no audience: _please, save yourself just once, you damned brat._

That’s never been in the cards for someone like this and they both know it. Ash closes his eyes and clicks the door shut, so quiet it almost goes unheard.

—

_God, I’m scared._

**Author's Note:**

> Title and italicized lyrics come from "Learn How to Use It" by Kyddiekafka (feat. Foreign Forest).


End file.
